DOES HEREDITY OR ENVIRONMENT MAKE MEN? 505 



picture of other men, our enthusiasm for environment continues as 

 i^reat as ever. The poorest soil will increase its yield somewhat if 

 fertilized; but the same stimulus given to rich soil will increase its 

 yield many fold. The one-talent man will improve a great deal by 

 education; but the five-talent man will improve enormously. This 

 should be the chiefest source of comfort to the environmentalist him- 

 self — that the better the heredity upon which he expends his efforts the 

 richer will be his rewards. It takes all the skill of teachers trained in 

 the best pedagogy in the world to teach some children to read and 

 write, while other children practically teach themselves. By doubling 

 our educational efforts we would likely quadruple men's achievements, 

 their generosity, integrity, courage, determination, and thus quadruple 

 what Woodrow Wilson called "the world's fitness for affairs"; but if 

 we could double men's hereditary powers, their inborn virtue and excel- 

 lence, the range and delicacy of their imaginations; the sweetness and 

 charm of their personalities, and the exaltation of their natural desires, 

 the humanism that would result — and what is civilization for except 

 for a larger and finer humanism — would be beyond our power to fore- 

 see. And this difference between the two alternatives that are always 

 before mankind — the alternative of building either a better heredity or 

 devoting all their efforts to building a better environment — is not a fan- 

 ciful difference; for we see always before us that some men have many 

 times — Galton thought thirty times — as great natural endowments as 

 have others. Some men have in some directions a thousand or a 

 million times greater powers than have other men. 



The millennium, therefore, will be hastened by better education; 

 but it will be vastly more accelerated by better men. And after all, 

 is not this the final answer to the whole tangle of heredity and environ- 

 ment? Better social machinery will make better men and better men 

 will enormously enhance the efficiency of the social machinery. Our 

 enthusiasm for environment will increase as we see more clearly 

 through the improved education the modern world has given us how 

 a well-born race would use education for still more exalted ends. 



Instead, therefore, of being antagonistic, heredity and environ- 

 ment are reciprocal agencies, both placed at last by science within the 

 grasp of man, by which he can lift his species out of the bloody sea 

 of natural selection and fare happily forward to richer and more fruit- 

 ful goals. The Garden of Eden is not in the past, it is in the future. 

 And the trees of knowledge grow along the whole highway that leads 

 to it. It is an arduous highway; but its hardships need not be those, 



